Politicians, a victim of tragedy and at least one Maltese saint have made it to a collection of funerary memorial cards that has just been donated to Heritage Malta.

The collection, which grew from one discarded specimen to several thousand, may shed light on changing fashion trends, orthography and craftsmanship.

The collection still needs to be sorted, but so far, the oldest ones date back to the late 19th century, Inquisitor’s Palace curator Kenneth Cassar told this newspaper.

Alfred Calleja, a former Sea Malta officer, started his collection some 35 years ago while taking a stroll in Fgura. On that day, he had come across a discarded memorial card, which he picked up and decided to keep.

From then on, whenever he spotted a funeral, he would park his car nearby and ask for a card. As word spread about his collection, people started turning up with memorial cards, and a certain Fr Ġużepp Zarb from Żabbar handed over a collection of early-20th-century cards.

Mr Calleja also received some obituary cuttings from Gozo church leaflets. His collection also includes cards from abroad.

As the years rolled on, he realised he had to pass on the collection to someone who could continue where he left off. However, he did not find someone as committed as him.

So he passed it on to Heritage Malta, which plans on making the collection accessible to the public and researchers, Mr Cassar explained.

The cards will be kept at the Inquisitor’s Palace, which is also the national museum of ethnography. They provide a wealth of information on thousands of Maltese, while the size of the collection allows for a comprehensive insight into the changes that such memorials went through over the years.

The oldest cards in the collection provide information about the person’s character, but as time passed, they became less poetic, making way, however, for other interesting characteristics, such as the deceased person’s devotion to a certain saint or their hobbies.

One such card reads that Dun Carm Mifsud, who became a priest in 1897 and passed away just two years later aged 37, was a role model for his colleagues. He was devoted to the Church, the card says, poetically describing him as “the salt that kept harm at arms’ length and the light that drove darkness away”.

A descriptive, tragic card is that for eight-year-old Twannie Aquilina, who was found murdered at his mother’s home and had “his body all scratched up and bruised, his head pierced and his throat cut”.

The inscription is complemented with a prayer asking the young boy, found dead on the night of August 23, 1960, to “pray for us”.